Reason Magazine - Topics > Congress

Dead on the Fourth of July

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The first time I met Jesse Helms was in 1981. My fifth grade class had risen early, boarded a bus in North Carolina, and taken a five-hour trek to Washington, where we tried to pack a week's worth of civic tourism into a single day. Zipping through the U.S. Senate, we filed in for a photograph with our state's senior senator.

"So these children are from Raleigh?" Helms said to a staffer.

"No," came the reply. "Chapel Hill."

A hint of a scowl crossed the Republican legislator's face. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, knowing as I did that he hated my hometown and the liberal-leaning university it contained. When the state was mulling a plan to build a zoo, Helms had cracked that it should just put a fence around Chapel Hill.

That would not be an appropriate comment for this occasion, so our host changed the subject. His eyes scanned the crowd of kids, and apparently they fell on my nametag. Before I understood what was happening, he was shaking my hand. "My name's Jesse, too," he drawled. "Maybe we're related!" I stood there dumbly, surprised and paralyzed; before I knew it, my namesake was gone and we were marching to the next stop on the tour.

One of the class chaperones fell into step beside me. "Thanks," he said, "for not spitting in his face." I got the impression from his tone that a part of him would have liked it if I had spat at the senator. If Jesse Helms hated Chapel Hill, then virtually everyone I knew from Chapel Hill hated Helms right back.

By the '90s that contempt had spread far beyond our city and state. If you asked the average liberal about Helms in 1995, there were two things he was likely to tell you: that the senator was a racist and that the senator was a censor. The evidence for the first charge, if you cared to ask, would be a TV ad he ran in his 1990 campaign, in which a white man crumples a job application after a racial quota keeps him from finding work. The evidence for the second charge would be Helms' crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal program that funded material he considered obscene.

In other words, the typical Helms-bashers were actually prettifying the picture. The man was a Jim Crow nostalgist who wanted to obliterate the line between church and state, and they were whining about his run-of-the-mill conservative stances on affirmative action and Robert Mapplethorpe. You'd think Helms was just another Republican, notable only for his accent and his ties to the tobacco industry. But he was much more than that. You needn't favor racial preferences or federal art subsidies to find Jesse Helms objectionable.

Helms was, almost literally, a child of the segregationist order. His father was a cop in Monroe, North Carolina; in his recent book Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, the historian William Link writes that the senior Helms "was expected to maintain the racial hierarchy through intimidation and, if necessary, brute force." (Link quotes a black Monroe woman who said the officer used "his power to the fullest, in the wrong way.") The constable's son came to prominence as a defender of that racist regime, but he made those old arguments in a new medium, reading virulent editorials on WRAL-TV in the '60s. "Are civil rights only for Negroes?" he said in one 1963 broadcast. "White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated."

In the 1950s, an alliance emerged between free-marketeers and segregationists. It was not an inevitable union: Jim Crow laws were, in addition to all their other injustices, an intrusive array of restrictions on freedom of contract and freedom of commerce. But the alternatives suggested by the civil rights movement often restrained those freedoms from the other direction, opening space for a coalition that would have seemed much stranger a generation earlier. Thus, in 1964, the Deep South voted for Barry Goldwater, a man who had taken the lead in desegregating his family's department store, the Arizona Air National Guard, and the Phoenix public schools years before the law required any of those institutions to be integrated. He had also voted for federal civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. But he shared the segregationists' hostility to two provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that mutual interest allowed conservative activists to create a political realignment.

If Goldwater relied on the votes of racists he despised, then Helms was the other side of the alliance: a segregationist who could speak the language of liberty but never really adopted freedom as a principle. Helms realized early on that it looked better to position yourself as a foe of big government than as a defender of state-created privileges, so he preferred to talk about the new powers the federal government was claiming, not the old powers the state government had exercised for decades. In other words, he learned to talk like Goldwater. But there's little doubt that his sympathies lay with the larger system of legally enforced white supremacy. Helms maintained that the South had no racial problems until the feds "manufactured" them; according to Link, he established quiet ties to the White Citizens' Councils and similar groups.

Helms' anti-statist rhetoric wasn't entirely a pose. As a Raleigh city councilman in the '50s, for example, he led a lonely fight against the federal urban renewal program. But anyone tempted to believe the right-wing direct-mail king Richard Viguerie's eulogy for the senator—sample quote: "It's the free market views, policies, and leadership of President Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Milton Friedman that have led the world to experience the greatest movement out of poverty in history"—should review Helms' record in office. As far as economic policy was concerned, his chief concerns were preserving and extending the trade barriers that protected North Carolina's textile industry and the subsidies that supported North Carolina's tobacco farms.

In social policy, Helms favored anti-porn statutes, "voluntary" school prayer, and—"in the best interest of public health"—sodomy laws. In international affairs, he pushed for U.S. aid to some of the most repellent figures on the world stage, from the Salvadoran death-squad organizer Roberto D'Aubuisson to the Mozambican terror group RENAMO. After the Cold War ended, some critics of American foreign policy hoped that Helms' hatred of the United Nations and nonmilitary foreign aid would transform him into an old-fashioned isolationist who eschewed foreign entanglements. That isn't how it worked out. Over the course of the decade, Helms sponsored bills to tighten the embargo against Cuba and to send $100 million in military aid to Bosnia. After some early dithering, he also came out for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. By the end of his career, he couldn't even hold the line against the foreign aid he loved to criticize: Under the influence of his buddy Bono, Helms put his weight behind a $200 million assistance package for Africa.

In other words, the man was no more committed to limited government abroad than he was committed to it at home. But he maintained his reputation as a skinflint isolationist. And why not? A good politician knows how to lie, and Helms was an expert politician.

1983: another school, another field trip to Washington, another audience with the man who shares my name. Now a smartassed seventh grader, I set a goal for myself. Tired of receiving mass-produced deceptions via the newspapers and television, I would get a legislator to lie to me personally. I approached the senator. "Excuse me, Mr. Helms," I said in a deferential tone. "My name is Jesse Walker. I don't know if you remember me, but we met a couple years ago on another class trip."

The senator took the bait: "Why, of course I remember you, Jesse." He smiled warmly, looked me straight in the eye, spoke in a confidential tone, and gave me the heartiest handshake I had ever encountered.

It should have been a private moment of triumph. Instead it taught me what a born politician can do. For a second, I forgot the whole plan and believed him.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:57:00 EDT

Now under consideration in Congress: a bill appropriating $50 million per year through 2012 to fight . . . bed bugs.

And yes, that’s the actual name of the bill.

Don Young Gets Medal-of-Freedomed

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:00:00 EDT

A cabal of allegedly free market advocacy groups has inexplicably bestowed Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) with a "Hero of the American Taxpayer" award.

The link above explains why that's not a terribly bright idea.

Or Perhaps I Should Say "Less Unpopular"

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:50:00 EDT

Glenn Greenwald spots something interesting in a recent Fox poll: As of last week, the Democratic Congress is more popular among Republicans than Democrats.

He Could've Beat Those Dirty Lakers

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Twenty-two years ago yesterday, University of Maryland star forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. In the wake of his death, Congressman James C. Wright, Jr. (D—Texas), proposed the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act—which, in the course of "providing strong Federal leadership in establishing effective drug abuse prevention and education programs," and "halting international drug traffic," established minimum sentences for the possession or sale of illicit substances.

Wright resigned from Congress in ~~1986~~ 1989, disgraced after committing an ethical faux pas or two, and the University of Maryland has a new (decent) power forward to worry over in Landon Milbourne, but the federal minimum sentencing laws are still around.

It's a crying shame that Bias, who signed with the Celtics two days before he died and likely could've been part of the dynasty that beat those dirty Lakers, is remembered more as the impetus for draconian drug laws than as a hoopster with a heart of gold and a sick inside game.

Check out Senior Editor Jacob Sullum's article on minimum sentencing here, and those of you who aren't too old to engage in "social networking" can check out reason's new Facebook page here.

Permanent rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Amit Singh is 33 years old. If you were tending a bar when he walked in, you’d probably card him. Before his April speech to a slowly filling restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, he ambles around the room, grabbing shoulders, shaking hands, smiling sheepishly. Friends who have shown up to support the unassuming defense industry engineer sit nearby, bemused.

“When he first showed me his website,” says Orrin McNamara, one of Singh’s neighbors, “I said: ‘Is this a joke? Amit for Congress?’ Seriously, I thought it might have been a joke.” He ponders for a moment. “I don’t know what the joke would have been.”

A bit after 7 p.m., Singh walks to the podium and sounds like what he is: a Republican congressional candidate. He talks about a “new vision for a brighter future.” Boilerplate, candidate-from-a-kit stuff. Singh smiles and darts his eyes down when he draws applause and laughs nervously when he takes a swipe at his Democratic incumbent. He doesn’t sound comfortable—until the speech shifts.

“We’ve seen how the politics of fear chip away at freedom at home,” he declares, sounding suddenly sure of himself. “Where are the defenders of freedom today? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons? Where are our Barry Goldwaters? There are a few defenders of freedom, but they are outnumbered, and they need our help.”

Singh has one particular defender of freedom in mind: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). It was Paul’s libertarian-minded presidential campaign that got Singh into politics, first as a donor, then as a Virginia volunteer, and now as a candidate for Congress. A month after watching Paul score 4.5 percent of the vote in the Virginia primary, Singh threw his hat into the ring for the 8th District congressional seat.

By the end of the 2008 elections, as many as 40 self-proclaimed Ron Paul Republicans will have run for national office. The reception they are getting from their state parties ranges from warm embraces to Terminator-like efforts to destroy them. After a year of supporting a presidential candidate the party’s gatekeepers treated like a radioactive performance artist, the Paulites are used to ridicule. They want to carve out a permanent place in Republican politics, regardless of whether the party wants them to be there.

The Ron Paul Republicans come in two breeds. The first and largest category—about half the candidates collected on the aggregating site PaulCongress.com—are utter long-shots. They live either in districts where Democrats could hold fundraisers for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and still win by landslides or those held comfortably by old-line Republican incumbents. David Wasserman, the House race editor for the Cook Political Report, says these candidates shouldn’t get their hopes up. “You can argue that it says something about the state of our democracy, the nature of the way districts are drawn, or the nature of incumbency,” Wasserman says. “We shut out a lot of viable people in these safe seats.”

Maryland’s Peter James lives in one of those districts of doom, a snaky, overwhelmingly Democratic gerrymander in the black suburbs of Washington, D.C. In the run-up to the February 12 primary elections there, James did the grunt work of organizing the Montgomery County Ron Paul Meetup group while hitting the pavement to win the Republican nomination for Congress. He spent $6,000 and all the free time a computer consultant can wrangle to win a primary against two other candidates—one of them another Ron Paul Republican.

“We had some Libertarian Party activists, some conservative Republicans, and about a third of the people we had were liberal Democrats who didn’t like their party’s candidates,” James says. “I’d go up to someone and tell them I was running for Congress. They’d ask the party. I’d say, ‘Republican.’ They’d say, ‘I can’t vote for you.’ Then I’d say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh! Well, I like him.’ ”

Maryland is ground zero for Ron Paul Republican candidates. Six of the state’s eight congressional districts are held by Democrats; four of the six Republicans running to challenge them were volunteers for Ron Paul. The Maryland Republican Party, which was kicked to the curb in the 2006 midterms, is happy to have them. “We welcome everyone to the Republican Party,” says state party Executive Director John Flynn. “We’re in the minority! Two years ago we didn’t even field candidates for two of these races, so the Ron Paul Republicans are really adding something.”

Like the man who inspired them, Paul’s flock deviates far from the Bush-era GOP’s platform and organizing tactics. When I ask Peter James what he has done to coordinate with the other three Maryland Ron Paul Republicans, he says they’ve talked about launching a viral video or a newspaper. One of James’ “main issues” is “providing an alternative currency,” not exactly a mainline Republican talking point. Flynn doesn’t mind; he shrugs that it’s “one of Peter’s issues.”

Other state parties are less welcoming. John Wallace is a 64-year-old New York real estate broker who started working for Paul, in part, because “he was the only one talking about the North American Union,” an alleged plot to merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. Wallace jumped into a primary for a suburban seat that Republicans lost in 2006; the party was backing the millionaire former party chairman Sandy Treadwell to try to seize it back. “I’ll go to one of these county meetings,” Wallace says, “and people will say to me: ‘My God! You’re right on the money. That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ Then they’ll head back to the table and vote for Treadwell.”

Ron Paul himself has endorsed just four of his followers-turned-candidates, and one of them, Jim Forsythe, dropped out of his New Hampshire congressional race in April because he lacked funds and name recognition. The others—including New Jersey’s Murray Sabrin and North Carolina’s B.J. Lawson—have drawn opposition from local Republicans unwilling to take the Paul plunge. (Paul has also endorsed Peter James.)

Paul’s reticence stems from not wanting to see his name attached to some candidate with whom he might not agree. “If you have some name recognition and some money, you have to be careful,” he says. “To say, ‘I’m a Ron Paul Republican,’ and to expect some money and an endorsement from me—I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The other breed of Ron Paul Republican is neither tolerated as a sacrificial lamb nor pushed away as a nuisance. He is the candidate with a fighting chance for a seat the Republicans genuinely hope to contest. Amit Singh isn’t counting on a Paul endorsement as much as he’s trying to create a local version of the Ron Paul revolution. Mark Ellmore, the Republican candidate who lost the 8th District nomination in 2006 and has been running for it ever since, warns that Singh will “have trouble securing the Republican base,” but that’s as far as the insults go. “Ron Paul supporters are absolutely great for the Republican Party,” Ellmore says.

So while national Republicans never took Ron Paul seriously, Virginia Republicans are sizing up Singh with interest. An internal poll shows him in striking distance of a primary win. Statewide Republican leaders, warm to the idea of an Indian-American candidate, are considering official endorsements.

Ellmore’s hail-fellow-well-met attitude is something new for Ron Paul Republicans. They have spent a year being mocked while posting campaign signs, hustling into straw polls, and Googlebombing the Internet. If they had dissolved after the GOP nomination was locked up, that’s where their legacy might have ended. Instead they’re putting together the first outlines of a political bloc, one that’s increasingly independent from the activities of Paul himself. Even if none of them wins this November, they’re beginning to force the party to take them seriously at last.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Farm Bill Follies

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The $300 billion farm bill is being cobbled together by Congress this week. As Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) noted, "It's not just a farm bill. This is a farm and a food and an energy bill."

As Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausage. It's better not to see them being made." Let's take a look at these three aspects of this unappetizing piece of sausage.

First, what do the farmers get? Answer: A lot. Last year, net farm income reached a record level of nearly $89 billion due to high crop prices. Farm household income averaged $84,000 in 2007, according to the Environmental Working Group (the 2006 average for all U.S. households was $66,000). Despite such good times, the federal government showered $5 billion in direct payments on 1.4 million farmers.

These direct payments have nothing to do with crop productivity or a safety net in case of low prices—they are basically gifts to farmers just because they are farmers. In fact, farmers with gross incomes up to $2.5 million have been eligible for these payments. President Bush wants to cap that at $200,000 in income, but the House is considering a cap of $500,000, and the Senate voted to cap the payments at $750,000 per year in income. Overall, Congress shaved just 2 percent off of the direct payments of $5 billion per year over the next four years. While this is a barely discernible improvement, one would think record high farm incomes combined with a world food crisis would make this a good time for Congress to scrap farming subsidies altogether.

It is true that about two-thirds of farm-bill spending funds nutrition programs such as school lunches and food stamps. Lawmakers added $10 billion to the food stamp program to help lower-income Americans address higher food prices. But why are food prices higher in the first place? Part of the reason is the federal government's subsidies and its mandate to turn food into fuel—which brings us to the legislation's energy policy madness.

In December, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated that the U.S. produce 9 billion gallons of conventional biofuels this year. The Act requires that 15 billion gallons of conventional biofuels be produced by 2015 and that 36 billion gallons of conventional and "advanced" biofuels be produced by 2022. How does this affect food prices?

Higher corn prices result from biofuel mandates and subsidies, which encourage farmers to plant fewer acres of wheat and soybeans—which in turn raises their prices. In addition, corn is the chief feed grain for which producers of beef, poultry, and pork must pay higher prices which they will eventually pass along to consumers. In 2006, a bushel of corn sold for just under $2; today it sells for nearly $6.

Currently, most biofuels are produced by turning corn into ethanol. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the 2008 corn crop will be 14.6 billion bushels, of which 3.2 billion[*] bushels will be fermented into ethanol. In other words, about 22 percent of our corn crop will be floating out the tailpipes of our automobiles next year.

The new farm bill contains a small gesture in the direction of sanity by reducing bioethanol subsidies from 51 cents per gallon to 45 cents per gallon. This should reduce the price of a bushel of corn by about 3 cents, according to the Des Moines Register. On the other hand, Congress is trying get around the unintended consequences of its biofuels policy by offering $1.01 per gallon subsidy for so-called cellulosic ethanol. Large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol has yet to take off, so the farm bill also disperses $400 million in tax credits in the hope of jumpstarting such production. In addition, the bill extends the tariff on imported ethanol until 2012.

The biofuel mandate is not the only reason for higher food prices—higher oil and fertilizer prices as well as commodity speculation also contribute substantially.

But there's no excuse for Congress to make matters worse with this farm bill. As Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) declared, "Negotiators managed to avoid every opportunity to reform wasteful, outdated subsidies while piling on additional layers of unnecessary spending." As a consequence, Americans can look forward to thinner wallets as they struggle to fuel their cars and feed their kids.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

[*]: Due to an editing error, this originally read million.

"Frankly, These People Are Economically Illiterate"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Here's a tasty tidbit from a Roll Call story about the many members of Congress--especially those who will be making decisions about congressional action in response to the banking crisis and coming recession--who have been taking a beating in the market:

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who works with many GOP Members on their financial disclosure statements, suggested...that it's not surprising that nearly 10 percent of lawmakers may be out millions of dollars because of the current credit collapse.

“Frankly ... these people are economically illiterate,” she said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), for example, may face as much as $2.9 million in banking stock losses, according to the story. None of the affected senators have announced any intention to recuse themselves from decisions about bailouts and regulatory changes, either on the grounds of conflict of interest or on the ground of economic illiteracy.

Via The Weekly Standard

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Rep. Jeff Flake on U.S.-Cuba Policy

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

...

Really Full Disclosure

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:21:00 EST

New way to bedevil those working in and for Congress, from the website LegiStorm's press release:

LegiStorm, the Web site that first caused controversy in Washington by publishing congressional staffer salaries, has now launched the first database of personal financial disclosures for thousands of the most powerful aides.
By law, members of Congress and their highest paid staff - who tend to be the most powerful on Capitol Hill - are required annually to disclose information about their personal finances, including details about their debts, stock portfolio, outside earned income, spousal employment, major gifts received and even their gambling winnings.
..........

Rules from the House of Representatives state, "The objectives of financial disclosure are to inform the public about the financial interests of government officials in order to increase public confidence in the integrity of government and to deter potential conflicts of interest."
[LegiStorm founder Jock] Friedly expects controversy with the new free database. "I understand that congressional aides want to jealously guard their privacy and I sympathize," he said. "However, these are the behind-the-scenes power players who control a $3.1 trillion federal budget and write all the laws of the land. It's hard to argue that they are not important public figures worthy of a little scrutiny."

Start your private investigation at LegiStorm today!

Ron Paul: Don't Let Them Gilchrest Me

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:57:00 EST

Fearing defeat in his March 4 primary contest for his congressional seat in Texas, Ron Paul calls on those who gave so surprisingly and generously to his presidential run to give now to his congressional race.

My February reason cover feature on Ron Paul and his fans.

UPDATE: For details on why Paul thinks he needs his supporters' help and pronto, see this from Pajamas Media saying internal polls from both Paul and his opponent Chris Peden have Paul behind 11 points.

Leaving Wayne's World

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:11:00 EST

With 98 percent of the votes counted, it looks like Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, one of a small handful of antiwar Republicans in Congress, has been defeated by the Cockeysville conservative Andy Harris. (Gilchrest's other major challenger, E.J. "Rupert" Pipkin, finished third.) Harris had been endorsed by the anti-tax, anti-spending Club for Growth because of his "consistent track record of fighting for limited government and pro-growth policies." Unfortunately, Harris' "consistent track record" includes his support for an unnecessary war that has already cost over $1 trillion. I have plenty of problems with the incumbent's economic record, but on the most important issue related to fiscal conservatism in the last 10 years, Gilchrest has been right and Harris has been wrong.

It's far from certain that Harris will be able to defeat Democrat Frank Kratovil. The Dems will pour money into taking the district now that their sometime-ally Gilchrest is out of the picture; and Harris, who lives on the western side of the Chesapeake, will have a hard time attracting votes from the Eastern Shore.

The country faces an ugly choice this November: Either elect a Republican president and reaffirm the Bush foreign policy, or elect a Democrat and put both the White House and Congress in the hands of the same party. If the First District of Maryland turns against one of Washington's few antiwar Republicans and then hands his seat to a Democrat, it will have somehow managed to embrace the worst of both worlds.

Elsewhere in Reason: Dave Weigel interviewed Gilchrest last May, and he looked at the congressman's primary fight yesterday.

Lord of the Gadflies

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last Thursday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference to give a political speech more gripping and more combative than almost anything he'd said in his year-long campaign. The candidate who had to be pushed and pushed to talk about his opponents' records turned a machine gun on John McCain: the GOP frontrunner was wrong on Iraq, on campaign finance reform, on immigration. A crowd of half-skeptical conservatives who'd been backing Mitt Romney only a few hours earlier perked up. Here was a guy worth casting a protest vote for.

Later, when those conservatives were either deep in sleep or deep in their cups, Paul's campaign put out a press release announcingthe beginning of the end of the rEVOLution. "With Romney gone," the statement said, "the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero." The Paul campaign was going to downsize—"I am making it leaner and tighter." And most important, the campaign admitted "another priority" for Paul, namely victory in the race for his Texas House seat. "If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat," Paul wrote, "all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen."

Paul volunteers took the news hard. One organizer in an early primary state called me to gripe about the apparent surrender of the national campaign, wondering if the whole rEVOLution had been a scam to build a big donor list. But there's another, more likely explanation: Paul is legitimately concerned about holding on to his seat. Chris Peden, an ambitious businessman and councilman from Friendswood (pop. 32,460), has overcome a slow start and is buying anti-Paul advertisements which pound home the message that to question the foreign policy that led up to 9/11 is to "blame America first."

Peden has raised enough money and buttonholed enough GOP poo-bahs in the district to put a scare into Paul, who is only the latest torchbearer of a 2008 trend—purging the odd man out. Consider also the case of another failed presidential candidate, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), whom Paul spoke fondly of last year, and who said he might give Paul the vice presidential slot in his own White House. Kucinich is in critical danger of losing his Cleveland-area House seat to Democrats bored of his publicity-seeking and presidential bids. The Cleveland Plain Dealer endorsedhis strongest opponent, and Kucinich has been reduced to rattling his tin cupin front of YouTube viewers.

Kucinich and Paul won't face voters until March 4, but Paul's anti-war House ally Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) is in a life-and-death battle today for his seat on Maryland's conservative shoreline. He's been challenged multiple times by candidates who are more socially conservative or more economically conservative, but the war issue has weakened him, and he has drawn one challenger who's funding his own race and another who's got the backing of the Club for Growth.

All of this occurs as Barack Obama, looking increasingly like the Democratic nominee, is cooing to primary voters about the need for a heavily Democratic Congress. In Virginia this weekend he claimed that he, unlike Hillary Clinton, would be able to bring a huge Democratic wave to Washington. Such a "progressive majority" would enact the change that eluded Bill Clinton in his first two years in power, before the GOP took over Congress. Before he announced that he loved the troops too much to continue running for president, Mitt Romney said much the same thing. Neither was simply suggesting his adversaries were too divisive (though they were certianly doing that). Both Obama and Romney get how the realignment of the parties and the fall of Southern Democrats has made the House more homogeneous, more like a quick-acting parliament. Just a decade and a half ago, a newly elected Democrat would have to make nice with a huge caucus of conservatives within his party and a newly elected Republican would have to kiss the rings of blue-blooded moderate members from the Northeast.

Those days are gone, and the truly contrary members of each party in Congress can be counted on two hands. The efforts to beat Paul, Kucinich, and Gilchrest are, effectively, efforts to make the parties completely monochromatic. Since the start of this Congress, only eight members have voted with their party less than 80 percent of the time, and two of them are Paul and Gilchrest. Republicans in Washington publicly say good things about Paul, but activists believe that their party should stand foursquare behind the War on Terror, behind the current GOP leadership in the House in Senate, and against the Democrats. There is no room for people like Gilchrest, who bucks the party on spending and environmental issues. On the other side of the aisle, there is no patience among Democrats for Kucinich, who holds his head up and votes down war bills he finds too milquetoast. Being "Dr. No" is no longer being conservative. Now, it's hurting the team.

That isn't an indictment of anti-incumbent challenges. If half of Congress was replaced every four years, who would complain? The troubles of Paul and Gilchrest and Kucinich, though, might put an end to the era of gadflies. Paul is probably right that his rEVOLutioneers will pick up their batons and march without him. He is also right that if he loses his House seat, they'll be much worse off, without a single representative who takes their stands. Today's congressional gadflies are learning that the arm-twisting and lock-stepping that once defined urban or local political machines can, aided by the media, go national. Congress will never be a bubbling cauldron of ideas, but it doesn't have to be as binary and as bland as the anti-gadfly campaigners wish.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

The State Secrets Protection Act

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:55:00 EST

The ACLU welcomes a bill introduced by Ted Kennedy that will, supposedly, make it easier to challenge executive branch claims of "state secrets" to cover its legal ass. From its press release:

Senator Kennedy’s bill allows the court to review government national security claims, thus lowering the wall of the current state secrets privilege to just a hurdle. The current form of the privilege has allowed the administration to successfully hold off investigations into its extraordinary rendition program and its warrantless wiretapping program. The cloak must be lifted and we urge Congress to waste no time in passing Senator Kennedy’s bill.

Sen. Kennedy's own explanation, with detailed section-by-section summary, of the bill he introduced with Sen. Arlen Spector (R-Penn.). An excerpt:

In 1980, Congress enacted the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) to provide federal courts with clear statutory guidance on handling secret evidence in criminal cases. For almost 30 years, courts have effectively applied that law to make criminal trials fairer and safer. ......

Yet in civil cases, litigants have been left behind. Congress has failed to provide clear rules or standards for determining whether evidence is protected by the state secrets privilege. We’ve failed to develop procedures that will protect injured parties and also prevent the disclosure of sensitive information. Because use of the state secrets privilege has escalated in recent years, there’s an increasing need for the judiciary and the executive to have clear, fair, and safe rules.

................

The State Secrets Protection Act we are introducing responds to this need by creating a civil version of CIPA. The Act provides guidance to the federal courts in handling assertions of the privilege in civil cases, and it restores checks and balances to this crucial area of law by placing constraints on the application of state secrets doctrine......

.....the Act enables the executive branch to avoid publicly revealing evidence if doing so might disclose a state secret. If a court finds that an item of evidence contains a state secret, or cannot be effectively separated from other evidence that contains a state secret, then the evidence is privileged and may not be released for any reason. Secure judicial proceedings and other safeguards that have proven effective under CIPA and the Freedom of Information Act will ensure that the litigation does not reveal sensitive information.

At the same time, the State Secrets Protection Act will prevent the executive branch from using the privilege to deny parties their day in court or shield illegal activity that is not actually sensitive. A recently declassified report shows that the executive branch abused the state secrets privilege in the very Supreme Court case, United States v. Reynolds (1953), that serves as the basis for the privilege today. In Reynolds, an accident report was kept out of court due to the government’s claim that it would disclose state secrets. The court never even looked at the report. Now that the report has been made public, we’ve learned that in fact it contained no state secrets whatever—but it did contain embarrassing information revealing government negligence.

In recent years, federal courts have applied the Reynolds precedent to dismiss numerous cases—on issues ranging from torture, to extraordinary rendition, to warrantless wiretapping—without ever reviewing the evidence.

The full text of the "State Secrets Protection Act" (S. 2533) was not yet up on Thomas.loc.gov on first posting.

Matt Welch from Jan. 2006 on even more ugly aspects of how U.S. v. Reynolds's b.s. precedent has been applied--in one case, to rob an inventor of his rights. Jacob Sullum from Aug 2006 on the Bush administration's overenthusiastic use of "state secret" privilege.

The Anti-Smoking Slippery Slope on Capitol Hill

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:06:00 EST

As goes Capitol Hill, so goes the nation? What started as a Pelosi-imposed smoking ban turns into a ban on even selling tobacco products in the hallowed halls of our precious democracy. The Politico explains.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em in reason's extensive tobacco archives. And read Jacob Sullum's breathtaking book on the anti-smoking movement.

Call That Bluff, Congress

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:16:00 EDT

Bush comes out with a blood-curdling threat to Congress: if they don't confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, why then the U.S. will just have to go to bed without any attorney general at all for the remainder of his term. Can justice survive? Will chaos reign? Why don't we find out?

Jacob Sullum's latest on the Mukasey confirmation hearings and some hints as to why he's so important to Bush: his willingness to presume the president can act above and beyond the law.

Finally a Game Just for Adults: Fantasy Congress (Insert Larry Craig Joke Here...No Here...Yes There)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:43:00 EDT

reason reader and blogger Sandy Smith points us to the new simulation game, Fantasy Congress. From a writeup at Escapist mag:

Andrew Lee says he came up with Fantasy Congress in college, after watching his roommate obsess over fantasy football, and he frames his description of Fantasy Congress in fantasy sports terms. "Think of Fantasy Congress just like fantasy football," he says, "but instead of being a general manager of a football team, here you are the guy in the background who's picking and choosing the members of Congress that you think are gonna do well when they reconvene. Say, for example, you choose a number of members of Congress. ... It's exactly [like] fantasy football, except the metrics aren't touchdowns and interceptions."
Fantasy sports make use of preexisting statistics to determine how good a player is. Politics don't score that way, so Lee's team had to figure that out as they went along. "When we first started, we [used] legislation," he says. "Our users told us legislation is really boring. I can't tell when a piece of legislation is gonna be passed, but I can tell you, however, I can see when I read a piece of news - say, for example, right now with Senator Larry Craig from Idaho. He's in some trouble in terms of his bathroom incident. His scandal that's going on, I can see that. I'd like to be able to score points ... based off that. So we created a category for news mention. And in addition to that, you can actually see votes as they occur on C-SPAN. So people were interested in seeing votes."

More, including stories of players calling their congresshacks to improve their ratings and the greatest bio-line I've ever read ("Joe Blancato is an Associate Editor at The Escapist. His Fantasy Congress team, Team Wide Stance, is currently in fourth place in a 15-person league."), here.

Offical Fantasy Congress site here.

Me, I'm holding out for the Violent Fantasy Congress game.

Friday Funnies

info@reason.com (Chip Bok) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:53:00 EDT

An Act of Commissions

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:00:00 EDT

Every so often Congress steps back from the monumental issues of war, peace, and radio talk show hosts to remind us that it is fundamentally about power. A case in point: Last week's bi-partisan passage by the House of the Regional Economic and Infrastructure Development Act of 2007.

Proudly modeled on the Great Society-era Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), the legislation aims to spend $1.25 billion between 2008 and 2012 to set up five regional commissions that would hand out money to state and local governments, Indian tribes, and nonprofit organizations "to promote economic and infrastructure development."

Uh-oh.

Those buzz words signal an open-ended commitment to eventually spend billions and billions of federal dollars in pursuit of elusive "economic development"—much like the ARC itself. Long a target of federal pork busters, ARC constantly finds new "needs" to be met. Lately, that has involved millions to subsidize broadband deployment within its 13-state purview. The Senate recently passed legislation which would take ARC's funding from about $95 million in 2007 to $109 million by 2011.

No wonder so many members want their own commissions. Also, with earmarks in federal appropriations receiving so much negative press recently, a network of ostensibly independent commissions could prove a great way to funnel cash back home.

These new commissions would be the Delta Regional Commission, the Northern Great Plains Regional Commission, the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission, the Southwest Border Regional Commission, and the Northern Border Regional Commission. In total, all or parts of 26 states would be eligible to receive funds from a new commission were the bill to become law.

The Southwest border region alone is massive. It includes all counties within 150 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. That's 11 counties in New Mexico, 65 counties in Texas, 10 counties in Arizona, and 7 counties in California for a combined population of about 29 million. Figure a Peru or Iraq-sized populace with needs to be serviced.

The Congressional Budget Office relates that "at least 40 percent of the authorized funds would be used for grants to develop transportation, telecommunications, and other basic public infrastructure. Remaining funds would be used for other economic development activities, such as providing job training, improving public services, and promoting conservation, tourism, and development of renewable and alternative energy projects."

If that mission statement sounds like a lot of overlap with existing local, state, and federal entities, well, no one cares. All that the backers of bill care about are more photo ops with giant checks and more ribbon-cuttings.

Bill opponent Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) noted during debate on the bill that the commissions would spend millions in administrative overhead doing what other organizations already do in his state. He was politely ignored.

In addition, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that the bill does not forbid commission funds from being spent on lobbying efforts. Anyone familiar with the economic development racket at the state and local level knows what that means: lobbyists and consultants will be hired and directed to cook up various deals involving public money flowing to private hands for work of dubious quality. Jordan's attempt to fix this oversight was slapped down on the House floor.

And for all the talk of the commissions being a response to "grassroots" efforts to target persistent problems, bill sponsor Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.) does not sound like he has a free-form, problem-solving process in mind.

"We need standard procedures. We need a voting structure," Oberstar said in arguing for his bill. "Commonality establishment of local economic development districts, a consistent method for distributing economic development funds, a uniform set of procedures that will apply to all of the commission, and, finally, with commonality then we can have uniform evaluation standards of the results of these commissions."

In short, the feds want to play the economic development/economic incentives game along with the states, regions, counties, and cities. Wonderful. Not only that, but it is perfectly reasonable to expect that in the near future that development dollars from the Northern Great Plains Regional Commission will compete with a plan funded by the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission for a corporate relocation of a firm located in the zone of the Northern Border Regional Commission, which will probably be offering its own incentive package for the firm to stay put.

This sort of thing routinely goes on at the state and local level now. The proposed federal commission framework would only make it worse. But what reveals the plan as a totally self-serving political construct is the way one proponent framed the supposed problem the commissions would fix.

"In short, Mr. Speaker, our mills are closing, our young people are leaving, and too many of our workers are looking for work," one Maine congressman lamented.

In other words people are voting with their feet and moving to where they can find jobs in the great and wonderful American labor market. With a Census coming up and reapportionment after that, those private choices are a mortal threat to certain members of Congress who might be re-districted out of their seats.

If trying to reverse that trend is not worth a few hundred million dollars a year, what is?

reason contributor Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

GOP Sinking Ship Analysis: Yes, the Water is Rising. Reps. Cubin and Musgrave, We Hardly Knew Ye.

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:39:00 EDT

An addendum of sorts to Dave Weigel's post below discussing "Democrats on the march"--David Freddoso in the Sept. 10 issue of National Review provides a detailed scorecard analyzing the Republican congressional seats that the GOP is apt to lose in 2008.

Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-Ohio) Found Dead

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:27:00 EDT

Heart attack suspected.

A survey of his voting record--he voted with his party 85 percent of the time.

Also, He's a Liar

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 11:41:00 EDT

Although Alberto Gonzales is on his way out, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine yesterday said he will continue to look into the attorney general's stonewalling testimony to Congress regarding NSA surveillance and the termination of U.S. attorneys. The investigation, requested by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), will consider whether Gonzales' statements were "intentionally false, misleading or inappropriate." Not to prejudge, but I'd say probably, yes, and yes. Assuming Gonzales is not suffering from an early form of Alzheimer's, he was lying when he repeatedly said he could not recall his own involvement in the U.S. attorneys' dismissal. And when he denied that there was any disagreement within the Bush administration about the propriety of the NSA's warrantless surveillance, he was either lying or being deliberately misleading (referring to one aspect of the surveillance that everyone thought was OK, as opposed to the part he argued about with John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey). Gonzales' testimony, which prompted incredulous responses from Republicans as well as Democrats, is yet another example of his willingness to subvert the rule of law (in this case, by violating the law against lying to Congress) in the service of executive power.

Get Government Out of the Bathroom

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:50:00 EDT

Read Nick Gillespie's take on the Sen. Larry Craig scandal at the L.A. Times.

Honest and Open Thievery

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:49:00 EDT

In a letter posted at Congress.org, a constituent praises Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) for his "brilliant intellect." As evidence, Mitchell's admirer cites the congressman's vote for the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

The margin by which the act passed—411 to 8 in the House, 83 to 14 in the Senate—takes some of the shine off Mitchell's brilliance. Still, he's probably smart enough to realize what his colleagues evidently understand: Congress's new honesty and openness are not what they're cracked up to be.

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires that special appropriations added by individual legislators be listed in an online database at least 48 hours before they come to a vote. Critics such as Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained bitterly about a loophole: Congressional leaders can certify that a bill contains no earmarks, and there's no way to challenge that determination.

A deeper problem is that publicity does not deter wasteful, parochial spending that legislators want to publicize. Consider what happened last month when Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) challenged a $100,000 appropriation for a prison museum near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The earmark's sponsor, Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.), defended the honor of Leavenworth County, bragging that "we probably have more prisons...than any other county in the United States." She indignantly added that "the local residents are proud of their heritage and rightly so," since Leavenworth has hosted the likes of George "Machine Gun" Kelly and Nazi spy Fritz Duquesne.

The House approved Boyda's earmark by a vote of 317 to 112. Later she told The New York Times, "Democracy is a contact sport, and I'm not going to be shy about asking for money for my community."

So far this year the Democratic House has approved spending bills that include some 6,500 earmarks, not quite keeping pace with the Republicans' record of nearly 16,000 in 2005 but more than twice the whole-year total of a decade ago. Far from shaming legislators into fiscal restraint, the Times reports, "the new transparency has raised the value of earmarks as a measure of members' clout" and "intensified competition for projects by letting each member see exactly how many everyone else is receiving."

Congressional shamelessness likewise may undermine the goals of the new Senate ban on anonymous holds. A hold occurs when a senator refuses to let a bill or nomination proceed by unanimous consent, thereby requiring the measure's supporters to muster 60 votes to allow consideration of the measure.

Holds obviously can be used for purposes that offend supporters of limited government—to extort pork, for example, or obstruct fiscal reform. But any tool that blocks legislation is apt to do more good than harm. Notably, the hold's defenders include fiscal conservatives such as Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) as well as big spenders such as Robert Byrd (D-W.V.).

Still, it's hard to find fault with the new requirement that senators publicly identify themselves and state their reasons when they block legislation. We just shouldn't expect too much as a result of this openness. As with earmarks, legislators don't try to hide their actions when they're proud of them, even if they shouldn't be. Interestingly, no one put a secret hold on the secret hold ban.

Transparency may also prove overrated as a way of preventing lobbyists from influencing legislators by arranging campaign contributions. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires public disclosure of "bundles" totaling $15,000 or more in a six-month period. Like the new attention to earmarks, highlighting these donations may simply spur competition, as K Street's denizens strive to keep up with their neighbors.

Although honesty and openness are surely preferable to dishonesty and secrecy (in politics, at least), they're not an adequate solution to a government that does too much and is therefore a magnet for people seeking gifts and favors. If a pickpocket becomes a mugger, he becomes more open and honest, but that doesn't make him more admirable.

The Pantsuit Paradox

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:20:00 EDT

“Rage Over Cleavage!” was the headline that turned me into a Clinton booster. Other than that typically understated summation from the Times of India, last month’s spat over the state of Clinton’s décolletage saw wave after peristaltic wave of pious vapidity, followed by the occasional spasm of outright misogyny. In response to Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan’s controversial piece on Clinton’s decision to bare some breast, almost no one saw fit to recognize the immense challenges Clinton faces as a woman dressing to project authority.

Least of all her supporters. “Frankly, focusing on women's bodies instead of their ideas is insulting,” wrote campaign official Ann Lewis in a fundraising letter. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman excoriated “those media monitors who seek deep meaning in every shoe, sexual clues in every hemline, and psychological insights in every shirt collar.” Appearances shouldn’t matter, so why acknowledge that they do?

Forget the mountains of studies on cognition, perception, affective priming, the importance of signaling in social interactions, and the disadvantages women are known face due to implicit bias. The radical idea that clothes convey meaning is apparently something Givhan concocted in the corner of the newsroom and sold to credulous readers, every bit as cooked up as little Jimmy’s heroin in the embarrassing annals of Post history.

The semiotically-challenged might benefit from a jaunt through historian Philip Mansel’s Dressed to Rule, an erudite chronicle of power manifest in heels, robes, and epaulets of the 18^th century. Mansel is deeply informed about the rich social meaning of fashion, which communicated authority long before the days of mass media. “No society,” Mansel writes, “has modernized itself successfully without a dress revolution.” Mansel’s work is also—for obvious reasons—a heavily male history of power and dress.

This is the crippling historical lacuna Clinton, Pelosi, and their few female colleagues face every time they stare into their closets. They have no shoulder pads, as it were, to stand on. There is simply no female uniform that effectively and consistently broadcasts authority; no equivalent to the male suit. It’s hard to think of anywhere that this poses a problem more severe than in the Senate, a body so invested in gender equality, Givhan informs us, that until the early 90s its members refused to abide women in pants.

But who cares about such a trivial thing as the trappings of dress, especially on a woman of a certain age? A sizable literature on unconscious processes in cognition suggests that visual cues affect us on a level we are not aware of; that is to say, we are capable of making major choices based on input we don’t consciously notice or consider. You don’t have to be a misogynist, or part of the charming 11 percent of Americans who say they will never vote for a woman, to react in ways you’ve not subjected to conscious deliberation.

Lacking a Y chromosome almost certainly puts half the population at a disadvantage in the quest to signal competence and authority. Women are repeatedly judged as having performed better in blind assessments of their abilities, from thesis papers to orchestra tryouts, than they are judged when their gender is revealed. They respond by flocking to careers where competence is most directly signaled, like those in medicine and law. Implicit bias studies, though controversial, indicate that even the most progressive among us harbor stereotyped associations (pdf) about gender, family, and work.

There is evidence that these biases can be lessened with exposure to counter-stereotypes, another reason to hope that women can nail down a sartorial language of authority. Perhaps the closest we’ve come in recent years is an image of Condoleeza Rice sporting tall black boots and looking like something out of Angelina Jolie’s female assassin agency in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

High-heeled, knee-high boots are not an option for Clinton, who must somehow find a way to signal authority while conforming to an electably conservative presentation of gender. In contrast to many of the opulently dressed political bigwigs in Mansel’s history, she has to gesture toward competence and class while shying from elitism or impracticality. Obama and Edwards can achieve all of this with a well-pressed business suit and a shoeshine. Clinton must cope with many more elements of dress, and she can’t be sure that whatever frequency she transmits will be received uniformly by her audience.

Thus Clinton’s many makeovers, a ready source of snark for her critics. Clinton’s struggle to find an aesthetic language and a politically amenable identity can come across as inauthentic—fashion flip-flopping. Witness the easter egg-colored pantsuit, a crude attempt to splice male fashion with non-threatening female hues—the sartorial equivalent of New Shimmer. It was a failure, but it was also a start.

Even those who despise Clinton may have reason to hope that she and others can find sources of authority in the trappings of dress. It’s a perhaps unfair, but surely widespread, assessment of Clinton that she has chosen to compensate for the perception of feminine weakness with a truculent foreign policy. In a better world Clinton and other high-achieving women may help create, meticulous attire will send a stronger signal than mindless aggression.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor for reason.